Over the years, there have been a variety of hand stitching tools, including darning needles, knitting needles, crochet hooks, and rug hooks for hooking rugs to work with yarns, cording, or threads. More recently, some of these tools have been used to create stitched patterns with metal strands. Each of these tools has had particular applications, and required different degrees of attention and skill to be effectively used.
Suturing needles with rectangular handles have been available, such as taught in U.S. Pat. No. 385,586 for a surgical application, where a skin-piercing needle is curved for use to suture an incision in a patient. The curved needle attaches to a rectangular handle that has a rectangular cross-section, and the handle provides a storage region for additional needles and a bobbin, in addition to providing a grip.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,442,235 provides another curved needle having a sharp point, which is used for stitching. The needle has a rectangular handle for gripping and a side-mounted guide for directing thread to the curved needle. The needle assembly is designed to assist the sewer in developing a chain stitch to form a seam between two pieces of material.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,228,212 teaches a knitting needle that has a blunt point with an eye therebehind and a substantially cylindrical spacer attached thereto. The needle is mounted to a basically cylindrical handle that, in one embodiment, has a front end with a flattened section where the flattened surfaces are at a 45° angle to the eye to facilitate control of the thread during knitting and enable faster working. This needle is designed for practicing a method for hand knitting which employs a single needle.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,678,712 teaches a combination crochet hook and “looping needle”. It appears that the looping needle is used as an accessory when crocheting. Again, a spacer can be placed on the needle, and allows adjustment of loop size.
A variety of special tools have been developed for making rugs. These have classically employed one of two types of needles for hand crafting rugs, either a latch hook or a punch tool. The latch hook tool has a blunt hook with a latch which serves as a needle for threading precut strands through a needlepoint canvas and knotting them thereto. One such device is taught in U.S. Pat. No. 3,541,980. While this technique allows one to create a shag type rug with a design therein, the fabrication is labor intensive, since individual strands must be threaded through, and requires providing precut lengths of the yarn employed. Tools which attempt to overcome the deficiencies of the traditional latch hook tool are taught in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,860,155 and 4,413,847.
The alternative technique for creating home crafted rugs is to employ a rug punch tool which employs a sharp needle to pierce a tightly woven fabric carrying a continuous strand of yarn therethrough; when pulled back, friction of the fabric keeps the yarn from following the needle, thereby creating a loop. U.S. Pat. No. 4,306,510 discloses one such tool.
A further limitation of the tools that are currently used for the making of craft rugs, whether hooked or punched, is that they are not suitable for finishing the edges of the rug. Thus, it is necessary to employ additional binding equipment to bind the edges. Furthermore, existing rug-making tools are not designed so that they can be effectively used without other paraphernalia. The use of punch tools requires supporting the material in a frame while working on the rug, while the use of a latch hook tool requires a large number of individual lengths of yarn, which are difficult to keep organized when transported. In fact, various supplemental equipment has been designed to help organization of the yarn strands, such as taught in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,541,980; 4,229,864; and 4,413,847.
Additionally, most traditional needle crafts require considerable manipulation of the needle by the fingers of the user, making these crafts difficult and/or uncomfortable for users suffering from arthritis or similar ailments.
Thus, there is a need for a universal stitching tool that is simple to use and can be used for various craft tasks. Furthermore, there is a need for the development of a technique for using such a tool, or even an existing tool such as the needle taught in the '212 patent, to provide a hooked-type crafted material which is less labor intensive and which requires less attention to the mechanics of the operation by the tool's user, thereby reducing the level of concentration required by the user. There is also a need for a tool which reduces the amount of finger and/or wrist manipulation required by the user.